Since the final release of Drupal 8 at the end of 2015, we have been hatching the idea of a development platform as a kickstart route for smaller websites, featuring the latest Drupal technology. For IMPREX, we fine-tuned the development platform once again and expanded it to include extra functionalities which are now also available for future clients.

Smaller organisations, start-ups and event organisers need to shift gear quickly. They mainly need a tried and tested CMS that can produce an informative website quickly and easily. It goes without saying that it must be responsive, SEO-proof and offer all the standard usability features. For these kinds of clients, we have developed a kickstart route with Drupal 8.

After Amsterdam, London, Copenhagen and Bristol, this year Frontend United, the event for (Drupal) frontend developers and Drupal, will be held in Ghent. Three frontend developers from the Ghent web agency XIO are helping to organise the conference, which will take place in the Sphinx arthouse cinema in the centre of Ghent on 27 and 28 May 2016. The trio (Marieke Hollevoet, Pieter-Jan Baert and Jannick Vandaele) are enthusiastic about the event, which they are organising in their own time. “At this point, we're mainly looking forward to the moment when 250 people will be wandering around the Sphinx and the six of us made it happen”.

At XIO, we are dedicated Drupalistas, which is why we are investing in and helping to build the open source content management system Drupal. For our contribution to the Drupal Community, we are ranked 17th in the world and 2nd in Belgium.

Based on the DrupalCon session "Drupal 8 multilingual site building hacks” by Gábor Hojtsy (Gábor Hojtsy) and Vijayachandran Mani (vijaycs85), I took a deeper look into the multilingual capabilities of Drupal 8. The link to the event information and the full session can be found in the sources section underneath this blog post.

At XIO we strongly belief that e-invoicing boosts an organization’s efficiency, as we experience it every day. We started invoicing digitally ourselves in 2012. Since then we helped many of our clients with e-invoicing startups and web shop integrations. Let’s dive into some of the major e-invoicing benefits.

During the past few weeks at XIO we’ve had a nice project to get our teeth into; developing our own site with Drupal 8 beta2. It took some getting used to but we learned a lot, and all in all we were impressed with Drupal 8. Here we share our experiences - enjoy and share!

So what are the options to port a Drupal 7 module to Drupal 8? Well there is the option of rebuilding your module from-the-ground-up in Drupal 8. There is also the option of copying your Drupal 7 module into your Drupal 8 project and start cleaning up all code and errors manually. Or you can use the Drupal Module Upgrader module and get somewhere halfway between rebuilding from scratch and manually cleaning your Drupal 7 module.